Book: Airbus CEO dropped pants for plane deal

The battle for dominance in the plane business comes into focus this week as Airbus releases its annual orders for 2006. It is expected to lag Boeing for the first time since 2000.

"My instinct is that Airbus will survive and we will have a mature duopoly in this business," said Newhouse in an interview last week. "But Airbus is going to be behind Boeing for some time to come."

Although the competition has heated up, executives in the planemaking business are much less interesting now, said Newhouse, who also wrote 'The Sporty Game', a collection of his articles written for The New Yorker, which was published in 1982.

"There were more larger-than-life characters then by far," he said. "Now they are all tedious bureaucrats, most of them."

The exceptions, said Newhouse, are Airbus' marketing chief John Leahy and Scott Carson, the new head of Boeing's commercial aircraft unit.

"Carson was a breath of fresh air, easily the most impressive Boeing executive I met in Seattle," said Newhouse.

The author said he spent time in both companies' commercial planemaking headquarters researching his book, and talked to many current and former executives.

"Whether you go to Seattle or Toulouse you are going to run into a lot of people who are blowing equal amounts of smoke, criticizing the other guy's program and extolling their own," said Newhouse, an American.

"The difference is the Airbus people talk like actual people, whereas the Boeing people talk like people reading from a script written jointly by the PR and legal counsels."

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